Exploiting Redundancy for Secure Data Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks

Monitoring the environment is one of the main applications of wireless sensor networks. Given that these networks are densely populated and that local variations in the environmental variables are small, a large amount of redundant data is generated by sensor nodes. In this paper we present a protocol for data dissemination in hierarchical clustered sensor networks that integrates security and reduces communication overhead by removing data redundancy from the network. Furthermore, we show that by using our protocol we can provide security to the network without spending additional energy resources, particularly when we are dealing with high levels of redundancy. Additionally, a military monitoring application is introduced as a case study to evaluate the functionality of our protocol.